126 HUMANISM vn 



to the subtlety of nature, the crudeness of our universal 

 laws begins to appear. We grow better able to appreciate 

 the real individuality of things, and so substitute specific 

 1 laws for general. We no longer ascribe John Doe s 

 death to the universal mortality of humanity, but get the 

 doctor to tell us precisely why John Doe, and no other, 

 died. As we know him better, we do not account for a 

 friend s conduct because he is a man, but by a because 

 he is this man. In all our explanations we seek to get 

 down to the particular, to do justice to the individual 

 peculiarity of things, to enlarge the part assigned to 

 personal idiosyncrasy. On the other hand, the less we 

 know about a thing the more confidently can we lump it 

 together with others and the more general are the state 

 ments which the calculus of probabilities emboldens us to 

 make about it. Hence though in the case of the lower 

 orders of individuality such appreciation of the peculiar 

 nature of each thing may still be an impracticable and 

 indefinitely distant ideal, with regard to higher orders the 

 principle is well established. We could hardly say with 

 the poet that the proper study for mankind is man, if 

 there were not, even in the meanest, an inexhaustible 

 store of idiosyncratic reactions, an individuality, in 

 short, which becomes more and more conspicuous as we 

 pass from the lower to the higher, and looks less and less 

 like a combination of abstract universals ! Hence, if we 

 are to hazard any assertions concerning Omniscience, is 

 it not clear that it could have no use for universals, and 

 so far from regarding the individual as compounded of 

 them, would apprehend the idiosyncrasy of each thing in 

 its action, without the clumsy mediation of universal 

 laws ? 



In conclusion, then, let us contend against Mr. Ritchie 

 that other views than his own of ultimate reality are 

 tenable, that they answer the epistemological and meta 

 physical difficulties at least as well as his, and are at 

 least as deserving of the name of idealism (if Berkeley 

 retains any claim to the doctrine he discovered !), and 

 that they are far concreter and in closer interaction with 



